Canada needs a ruler

Canadians are no stranger to minority rule. Just about every household experiences it routinely. The body politic of the typical Canadian household consists of a husband, a wife, and a variety of children whose number goes up and down as circumstances dictate but whose vote is neither more nor less valuable for that.

When a critical crunch comes in household affairs, the family will formally gather to debate the issue. The children will whine and whinge about their special interests -- think of the New Democratic Party and the Bloc Québécois and, if you must, the Greens in a federal political context. The husband will offer his carefully weighed opinion about what course of action should be taken. Hold your nose and think of the Liberal opposition in the House of Commons. And the wife will speak, and since she always has 51 per cent of the vote, what she says always goes. Think of -- well, you can't carry this analogy this far because there is no wife with 51 per cent of the vote in this arrangement; there is only the hapless Conservative government, battered from pillar to post by an opposition that appears possessed by an election fever that can only be cured by a cold splash of water from a ballot box.

In a household, it's so simple, so neat and so to the point that one can only wish that national politics would work the same way. Unfortunately, as Canada discovered to its consternation Friday, the nation doesn't work that way when it has a minority government, which is quite a different thing than minority rule.

To complete the analogy, we would require that this new election end with a majority government. According to the polls, that doesn't seem likely. The most recent Ipsos Reid poll, taken just before the government was defeated Friday on a no-confidence vote introduced by the Liberals, showed the Conservatives comfortably ahead with 43 per cent of the vote, compared with a mere 24 per cent for election-hungry Liberals and a meagre 16 per cent for the luckless New Democrats -- although in Jack Layton's defence, his decision to cut the Tories loose was almost inevitable; how often can a marginal but ambitious socialist party ride to the rescue of a conservative government whose fundamental philosophy it purports to despise?

That's not a great poll for anyone, so what are these people thinking? The Tories may look today as if they are in striking range of a majority government, but governing parties almost always drop a few points in the polls as the election progresses. Those votes will go somewhere, either to the NDP or the Grits, one supposes -- it is tough to imagine voters who made a mockery of former Liberal leader Stephane Dion's Green Shift in the last election going Green now, and the Bloc doesn't really matter either way; it doesn't give a good goddamn about Canada, except where parliamentary pensions are concerned, and it continues to have its basic block of Quebec seats regardless.

So what are these people thinking? Well, quite frankly, I have no idea why any one of them, let alone all of them, is either jumping up and down in a tonight's-the-night dance of ecstasy like Michael Ignatieff or being smugly complacent about it like Prime Minister Stephen Harper. This is a very confusing time in Canadian politics and anyone who tells you that she knows what's really going on is probably lying.

What is clear amid all this confusion is that Canada cannot take much more of this. The nation needs a real government. I once was, in my misbegotten youth, a supporter of proportional representation and the minority governments that such a voting system would inevitably produce in a country such as Canada.

Fortunately, Canadians have been able to avoid proportional representation. Leave that to countries such as Italy, which doesn't seem to care whether it has government or not, and Belgium, which hasn't had a government in almost a year. Yay! Belgium, you might say, but you would be wrong.

Nations need governments. Canada particularly needs government. It is a complicated country that in any reasonable, logical sense should probably not even exist as one nation. We could make half a dozen little principalities out of the potage we call Canada.

The queer thing is that Canadians -- most of us anyway -- want it to continue to exist because we love our peculiarity. And that's why this unwanted, unneeded and unwelcome election will perhaps become a necessary one. After five years of minority government, we now know that what we need in Ottawa is a wife. We need a majority government with 51 per cent of the vote -- take your choice, Conservative or Liberal. We need a government that can listen to whining and whinging and the considered opinions of the opposition and then say: This is what we'll do, and do it. That is after all, what governments are for.

tom.oleson@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition March 26, 2011 A19